Nonlinear Fault-Tolerant Vibration Control for Partial Actuator Fault of a Flexible Arm

This paper presents a nonlinear fault-tolerant vibration control system for a flexible arm, considering partial actuator fault. A lightweight flexible arm with lower stiffness will inevitably cause vibration which will impair the performance of the high-precision control system. Therefore, an operator-based robust nonlinear vibration control system is integrated by a double-sided interactive controller actuated by the Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuators for the flexible arm. Furthermore, to improve the safety and reliability of the safety-critical application, fault-tolerant dynamics for partial actuator fault are considered as an essential part of the proposed control system. The experimental cases are set to the partial actuator as faulty conditions, and the proposed vibration control scheme has fault-tolerant dynamics which can still effectively stabilize the vibration displacement. The reconfigurable controller improves the fault-tolerant performance by shortening the vibration time and reducing the vibration displacement of the flexible arm. In addition, compared with a PD controller, the proposed nonlinear vibration control has better performance than the traditional controller. The experimental results show that the effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed. That is, the safety and reliability of the proposed fault-tolerant vibration control are verified even if in the presence of an actuator fault.